Taking a gap year was the best thing I did before coming to University! It gave me a whole new perspective on things I learnt in lectures as I had some real world experience. For me, it helped decide what I actually wanted to study and I love what I’m doing. My advice would be to make sure you keep an eye out for enrolment dates, and if unsure email a course advisor. They were super helpful in helping plan my degree while I was overseas. In terms of getting back into study, go and talk to your lecturers! Let them know you’ve had a break and they will be more than willing to give you some tricks. Also form a study group. brainstorming ideas and talking about your lectures is a great way to reinforce understanding.

Thanks Julie – that’s good to know. Our liaison team is planing on reminding students on gap years of key dates this year – so hopefully that will be one less thing for them to worry about. Good luck for the prize draw. 🙂

I am so glad that I took a gap year before coming to university. I went away thinking that I had my whole life mapped out but my time overseas shifted my perspective on myself, the world, and what I wanted to do. My tip is to be willing to change your mind about you where and what you want to study, and to be flexible and open-minded.

If you unsure about what to do after school I highly recommend a gap year which pushes you out of your comfort zone to try new things and meet new people. Recommend an overseas working holiday over working in your home town for a year. Many of my high school friends worried about getting back into study if they took a year out, but I found that coming to uni with more motivation and direction after my travelling helped me to do well in my studies. In fact my gap year experiences are what made me decide uni was for me. There are too many people in their first year of uni who are there because their parents wanted them to or because it was the easy decision of what to do with life after high school, and they are not getting much value out of being there.Of course some people have a clear direction of what they want to do after high school and that is awesome, but for myself and many people this is not the case. Its also often hard to see 6 months or a year in the grand scheme of things, I took two years out so am behind my age group but it really doesn’t matter!

Congratulations to LS, who won the prize draw and the $50 Westfield voucher. Thanks to all the gap year students who shared their tips – they were really helpful and provided some useful ideas to share with others currently on gap years.